January 1973
THE SEVENTH ART
Joseph Wechsberg
Film buffs in France and all over the world revere Henri Langlois, the founder and secretary-general of the French Cinémathèque and of the recently opened Musée du Cinéma. Students of the “seventh art” have called him the most important man in French films. Langlois never wrote, directed, produced, or criticized a film, but his influence on generations of filmmakers has been enormous. He was the first man to realize that films were going to disappear unless somebody collected them. “To show a work of art, it must exist; that is, it must be collected and conserved.” No one did this in the early 1930s. There were museums for paintings and sculptures and many other things, but not for films.
“In 1930 the silent film died, and many things were lost. Then Hitler came to power in Germany, and the Nazis burned the great masterpieces of German expressionism by Murnau, Pabst, Fritz Lang. In twenty years no one would have known what The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari had been like. I decided to do something about saving this volatile medium.”
Langlois—a round man with the face of a sad clown, a soft voice, and a deceivingly quiet manner—has devoted his life to rescuing films from oblivion. He considers cinema “the most significant art of our times.” He had no money, no backers, no position; all he had was his idea and the determination to go on in spite of incredible handicaps.
The Association de la Cinémathèque Française was created in 1936 to preserve everything concerning films. Among the présidents d’honneur are Charlie Chaplin, René Clair, Jean Renoir, and Alain Resnais. All the work was done by Langlois, with the help of admiring acolytes.
Today the Cinémathèque Française is called the National Library of Films. Langlois has collected some sixty thousand films, which are kept at the “blockhaus” at Bois-d’Arcy and at the Hôtel de Courcelles. Like all great collectors, he is also an artist who knows the subtle, secret rules. He doesn’t just collect; he creates a deeper harmony among his treasures. He wants to preserve the various epochs and schools and watch their interplay. He doesn’t talk about his favorites though he admitted, “Monsieur Chaplin, c’est un très grand monsieur.”
He soon understood that the film collection was only the beginning. He began to look for documents, scripts, scenarios, designs, and letters; he added a laboratory and a large library with thousands of books on the history of the cinema. He began to think about a museum that would be the logical evolution of the Cinémathèque. There were difficulties. French officialdom wasn’t impressed by this sloppy genius with the stains on his lapels. Langlois has no patience with petty bureaucrats, snobs, and people who don’t share his lifelong fascination. In 1968 he was fired by the government, but his fans raised such a fuss that he got his job back with much more freedom. He is not interested in administrative detail. He likes to visit a retired projectionist or the Flea Market looking for old posters. In Moscow he even managed to get some films from Eisenstein’s widow.
After years of hard work he saw his museum opened late in 1972 at the Palais de Chaillot. The City of Paris gave him the space, some two thousand square meters, where he set up sixty small halls with a chronological display of his treasures called “Seventy-five Years of the Cinema of the World.” The show is still unfinished, no catalogue exists, and the collections are unlabeled, but the exhibition is fascinating. It starts with the prehistory of the cinema—the sixteenth-century shadow theater in Ceylon, the first lanterna magica, an eighteenth-century view-shower, the old panorama box for showing colored slides, the first hand-turned animation machines, giving the illusion of movement, and the early experiments with “decomposing” the movement of flying birds and racing horses. Émile Reynaud’s “jouets d’optique,” Étienne Marey’s first motion picture camera, Edison’s experiments, and Max and Emil Skladanowski’s Bioskop shown in Berlin in 1895 are represented.
Then came Louis Lumière. One sees the first posters of the PhonoCinéma-Théâtre with the names of Sarah Bernhardt and Cléo de Mérode; a model of the first studio built by Georges Méliès in the Paris suburb of Montreuil; a model of the first Pathé studio from about 1905; a poster showing Max Linder; the first cartoons; and the start of Gaumont’s actualités. At this point a sense of déjà vu develops. One seems to walk back into one’s youth. (My mother always claimed that I caught pneumonia in 1913 when I was six after sitting through two showings of Victor Hugo’s terrifying Les Misérables. I had come home in a cold sweat. Could be.)
Walking through Langlois’s labyrinth is like hearing an old fairy tale one has almost forgotten. There is the robot one saw in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Buster Keaton’s porkpie hat, the caftan Valentino wore in Son of the Sheik (remember, ladies?), Greta Garbo’s plumed hat from Queen Christina, enlargements from D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. The grand epoch of the cinema has begun: Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, a uniform worn by Erich von Stroheim, posters showing Clara Bow and Wallace Beery, dresses worn by Mae Murray, Joan Crawford, and Marilyn Monroe. There is much about the great Eisenstein, including a small room filled with exhibits from Ivan the Terrible. There are relics of the work of the Italian neorealists: The Bicycle Thief and Miracle in Milan. There are small screens with slide projections, and there is a replica of a small modern studio, not to mention the red poplin jacket worn by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. A recent addition is the scenario of Harold Pinter’s The Servant.
Langlois estimates the value of his exhibits at about five million francs. The French government gave him one and a half million. Where did he get the rest? He gives a tired shrug. “I got it—somehow.” He thinks he has more material than anyone else but admits that the Russians have a lot. (“They were smart; they started collecting very early.”) The Italians, Swedes, and Americans are not far behind. When Langlois wants to buy dresses and other memorabilia, he must compete with wealthy collectors at public auctions. He gets nothing from the stars themselves because they don’t own the things they wear in their films. They turn everything back to the studio, “and the studios are very tough. They don’t care about posterity. They want money.”
The Cinémathèque’s projection room shows five films a day, the first at three in the afternoon, the last at half past midnight. Some films date from the early years of the century, and some are much more recent. The day I was there they showed Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Bresson’s Pickpocket, Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, Buñuel’s Viridiana, and Browning’s The Unholy Three with Lon Chaney (of Phantom of the Opera fame). Tickets are inexpensive (four francs), and there are always excited people queuing up.
Iasked Langlois who comes to see the films he selects.
“Mostly young people and generally people who don’t go to the cinemas on the Grands Boulevards. When we started these showings thirty years ago I had no idea that Astruc, Resnais, Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, and Rivette were regularly in the audience. All of them admit that their ideas were shaped by these shows. Our Cinémathèque and the museum are not directed toward the past, as are so many museums, but toward the future. The cinema is a living art, and we must always be conscious of the future. That’s why I am glad that so many children come here. Museums should be designed primarily for children. The grown-ups come for nostalgia, but the young come for inspiration and excitement, and you never know what may come of it.”
July 1973
THE MOST INTIMATE ROOM
Diane Johnson
Many of my best food experiences in France have come at the table of Colette, who can ski all day and then blithely fix dinner for fourteen guests from ingredients carried into her Alpine chalet over snowdrifts several weeks before. For more than twenty years we have joined Colette and her husband, Paul, for ten days of skiing. Colette and Paul do almost all the cooking for their guests (an English couple, a Swiss couple, half a dozen French, and us, the token Americans). In the chalet’s cave they have stowed hams, cheeses, and wines. Also lettuces, cabbages, carrots, yogurts by the dozen, cans of
tomatoes, smoked salmon, foie gras, mustard, cornichons, confitures faites maison, herrings in a crock. Legs of lamb and the cubes of veal for blanquette are kept frozen by virtue of being left outside under the snow on a terrace. All of which makes the atmosphere charmingly approximate that of a French farmhouse in some earlier century.
The rest of us help scrub vegetables, pare and peel, set the table. The French guests will take turns preparing some dish or other in rotation, but I, being American, am strangely exempted. We have never discussed this, but I think it is assumed that, being an American—even one who has lived in Paris part of the year for many years—I can’t cook. And the worst of it is that when I am there, something intimidates me, and they are right … I can’t cook a thing. Nor can I think of a dish I know by heart that is typically American. I might have claimed apple pie, but the Englishwoman, Hilary, has taken that as her specialty—never mind our belief that there is nothing as American (though, to be fair, I suppose it came from England originally). Once, I brought tortillas and chili powder, intending to claim enchiladas as our national dish, but was tactfully waylaid on the grounds that this was the night for Jeanette’s cheese fondue.
What our French friends tend to cook chez eux is, I’ve noticed, classic French food right out of Escoffier or Tante Marie: blanquette, boeuf bourguignon, and so on—dishes they know well, having cooked them many times before. When you ask about recipes, however, a certain vagueness sets in. Not that they are reluctant to tell you how they do it (as I first suspected), but rather that they often do not exactly know. Whereas, from the time when as a new bride in the ’50s I received my first copies of the Gourmet Cookbook (volumes 1 and 2), I have yet to be weaned from my dependence on cookbooks, my Paris friends seem never to have had one. Certain French dishes are just made a certain way. True, French magazines offer recipes. My friend Marie-Claude tells me that one such magazine, Elle à Table, is really quite good, but Marie-Claude is the exception to my classic-French-dish generalization, having perfected several exotic creations of her own devising. My son-in-law’s mother, Josette, tells me: “Some people put tomatoes into a boeuf bourguignon. I do so myself. Others do not. It depends.” Well, on what? But it’s no use asking.
Luckily, the kitchen at Colette’s chalet permits me to pry into her cooking secrets, as it has been designed to include guests. This used to be a fairly uncommon arrangement in France, but many an apartment now for sale in Paris boasts of possessing a cuisine américaine. Unfortunately, all this usually means is that the kitchen has been put in the living room—a convenient notion for property developers trying to squeeze as many tiny apartments as possible out of formerly grand ones.
In the normal run of things, the guest in a French home does not venture into the kitchen. The first time I tried helpfully to gather the plates at a dinner party, I caught the shocked expression in my hostess’s eye. Parisian kitchens can be small, cramped affairs where miracles are produced, but, whatever their size, they contain secrets not to be shared (such as which of the courses was bought at the caterers).
But to return for a moment to cuisine américaine. It has always seemed strange to me that a nation so devoted to the idea that American cooking is horrible should be willing to embrace not only its hardware but its name. American cooking is the subject of many a joke. At a recent dinner party where oysters were being served, for instance, someone recounted having seen an American horror film in which the heroine was trustfully dining on oysters with the man who would soon murder her. “Huge, huge oysters. Like that. And she poured ketchup on them.” The French guests screamed with mock horror—not for the violence to come but at the idea of ketchup on oysters.
The tradition of tried-and-true, excellent French home cooking by natural-born cooks has expanded over the years, resulting in those comfortable country restaurants that serve what is termed cuisine bourgeoise, or cuisine simple. And it is simplicity—plus, always in France, great local ingredients—that is its hallmark. There is very little emphasis on “fast” or “easy.” Whether cooking in a country inn or at home, the French have a much greater understanding than we Americans do of the fact that certain preparations simply take time. They also rely far more on things that are in season, like certain mushrooms—the sinister trompette-de-la-mort, for example. And when asparagus is in season, it is likely, and perfectly acceptable, that you will encounter it at many dinner parties in a row.
But certain more complicated dishes stand out in the repertoires of our friends. Colette’s quiche Lorraine (she really does live in Lorraine) and her blanquette de veau. Hélène’s tarte aux moules. Josette’s veau à la crème. We thoroughly relish our friend Gérard’s magrets de canard au poivre vert, and our son-in-law, Jean-François, makes a delicious saumon à l’unilatéral (salmon cooked on salt). All of which takes me back to distant, postwar America and the teacher who said that we had no need to learn the tu form as it was unlikely that little Illinois children would ever meet anyone French, let alone go to a French home for dinner.
What the French truly eat in the privacy of a dîner en famille must, of course, remain a bit of a mystery. If we could just peer in their windows, maybe we would understand how they stay so much thinner and healthier, and are longer-lived, than Americans. Are they cooking what we think of as “real French food”? Or do they simply snack? Or possibly fast? But whatever it is they are eating, food is a major part of daily discourse. They are always talking about food. And they love to shop. The métro allows the determined Parisian cook to go all over town for the best chicken (a man in the Marais), the best cheese place (on the rue de Grenelle), and the best tarte (Mulot, on the rue de Seine). Near my last apartment, the owner of the local fish market had a huge oven in which he would bake a big salmon for you at the end of the day and bring it over on a plank in time for dinner. For another secret is that the French cook buys a lot of things ready-made, on the sensible grounds that the specialist—whether boulanger, épicier, or boucher—simply does it better.
And, finally, a wonderfully practical secret. Many French cooks are helped by a clever little appliance called a saucière. This Teflon-coated saucepan rotates on a hot plate, stirring itself and thereby making the hollandaise or béarnaise while you attend to the rest of the dinner. I have to admit that although I have invested in one, I still find it a little daunting, even reproachful. Its very existence seems to suggest that I ought to be concocting a beurre blanc or a mayonnaise with every meal. I’ll call Jeanette and ask her to dinner. Perhaps she could bring her fondue …
SAUMON À L’UNILATÉRAL
(Salmon Cooked on Salt)
Serves 4
Active time: 10 min Start to finish: 20 min
2 cups coarse sea salt or kosher salt
1 (1¼-lb) center-cut piece salmon fillet
Spread salt evenly in a dry 10-inch heavy skillet (preferably cast-iron) and heat over moderately high heat until salt is hot to the touch and just beginning to smoke, about 4 minutes.
Pat salmon dry and season flesh with salt and pepper, then put, skin side down, on salt. Cook salmon, covered, without turning, until almost cooked through, 8 to 12 minutes. Remove from heat and let stand, covered, until salmon is just cooked through, 1 to 2 minutes.
Slide a spatula between salmon skin and flesh and transfer salmon to a platter (salmon skin will be too salty to eat).
COQUILLES SAINT-JACQUES WITH BEURRE BLANC
Serves 4
Active time: 30 min Start to finish: 30 min
1½ lb medium sea scallops (24 to 28), tough muscle removed from sides if necessary
¼ cup dry vermouth
1½ tablespoons minced shallot
1½ tablespoons white-wine vinegar
1½ tablespoons dry white wine
1 tablespoon cold water
9 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into tablespoon pieces
1½ teaspoons finely chopped fresh tarragon
Marinate scallops in vermouth 15 minutes.
Make beurr
e blanc:
Simmer shallot in vinegar and wine in a small heavy saucepan until liquid is reduced to about 1 tablespoon. Remove from heat and add water. Reduce heat to low and cook, whisking in 6 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon at a time, adding each new piece before previous one has melted completely and occasionally lifting pan from heat to cool mixture. (Sauce must not get hot enough to liquefy; it should be the consistency of a thin hollandaise.) Remove from heat and whisk in tarragon and salt and pepper to taste. Keep warm off heat, covered.
Cook scallops:
Drain scallops and pat dry between paper towels. Heat 1½ tablespoons of remaining butter in a 12-inch nonstick skillet over moderately high heat until foam subsides. While butter is heating, season half of scallops with salt and pepper. Sauté scallops, turning once, until just cooked through, about 4 minutes total. Wipe out skillet and sauté remaining scallops in remaining 1½ tablespoons butter in same manner.
Remembrance of Things Paris Page 30